Near-death experience — real or brain trick?

I’m mildly obsessed with a TV show called “I Survived … Beyond and Back,” on which survivors of near-death experiences recount the circumstances leading up to their “deaths” and what they saw and heard during the time they were dead.

Although I find it tough to listen to the part leading up to the NDE (getting crushed by a truck, having a massive heart attack in a high school classsroom), the part about the experiences after death is addictive. Yes, there’s often a bright light, as well as visions of dead relatives, an encounter with the numinous. And invariably the folks who have the NDEs come back changed — and not fearing death.

Now Salon has looked into the phenomenon of NDEs, which apparently are pretty much the same irrespective of religion (or no religion) and ethnicity.

Here’s a snippet:

NDEs are the vivid, realistic, and often deeply life-changing experiences of men, women, and children who have been physiologically or psychologically close to death. They can be evoked by cardiac arrest and coma caused by brain damage, intoxication, or asphyxia. They can also happen following such events as electrocution, complications from surgery, or severe blood loss during or after a delivery. They can even occur as the result of accidents or illnesses in which individuals genuinely fear they might die. Surveys conducted in the United States and Germany suggest that approximately 4.2 percent of the population has reported an NDE. It has also been estimated that more than 25 million individuals worldwide have had an NDE in the past 50 years.

Of course, some believe this is ax an experience of heaven and others think there is a neuroscientific explanation. But it’s interesting, no?

25 Responses

I was sitting around talking with friends last Saturday evening, when for some reason we started joking about narrowly escaping something. The joke was, “and my life flashed before my eyes!”

We were joking about that, coming up with “So that’s where I left my keys,” or “Now I remember that hot girl’s number from 1984.” Mine was, “That library book on Babe Ruth I lost in the third grade is in the attic of my old house!”

As Dumbledore said, “Of course it’s all in your head, but why on Earth would that mean it isn’t real?”

There is as yet no science to explain what consciousness is. There are folks who want to claim they can explain it, but their descriptions are peripheral. Like claiming to have found out what beauty is by noticing that when a person perceives beauty, part of the brain lights up, but then they must admit they have no way to predict what will have that effect, in essence they have no way to define what is beauty other than it’s effect. Those who observe consciousness in humans are no better at defining what makes a mind “me”.

So if they describe what consciousness does when other perceptions are starved away, they call it a trick of the mind, yet at the heart of many of the most ancient religions is the notion that personal identity is an illusion, we are one with the universe. When we are no longer distracted by the physical world, the story goes, we can perceive the one consciousness which is our true consiousness. In this perspective, it is identity that is a trick of the mind, and the NDE is a glimpse of reality.

Sure there is. But those who are unwilling to accept the explanations cling to the idea that there is some ding an sich that is not explained by the current work. Of course, they cannot point to the ineffable (by definition) and so claim victory.

I am a devout Catholic, but I do not believe that NDE is any sort of glimpse of heaven or the afterlife. I believe that it is just a “brain trick,” as you say in your title. I believe that a person does not get to see heaven (or hell) until after they really are irreversibly dead.

And, as I often like to do, I am going to capture and record your typo before you have a chance to erase it:

“… some believe this is ax experience of heaven …”

And to any other readers who are wondering, “numinous” is a real word. I have just looked it up in my old-fashioned dictionary printed on real paper.

My now elderly mother had an NDE as a teenager, during a near-fatal bout with spinal meningitis in the days before antibiotics. Seventy years later she describes it as vividly as if it had happened yesterday. She says that while floating along the tunnel of light she encountered her own mother, who had died a couple years earlier, telling her to go back because her father needed her. And so she went back.

Was it real? I don’t know, but I hope so. I guess we all find out sooner or later.

The people who had NDE’s NEVER actually experience anything except that which their consciousness has already previously experienced: relatives, green pastures, abstract bright lights and pleasant/calm feelings…which we all automatically associate with God/Heaven.

But in actuality, they never see THE Heaven, or God, nor what’s past the bright light, nor what’s down the long winding pathway leading somewhere, etc. It’s always ALMOST or CLOSE or NEAR to seeing heaven. If all these NDE’s were really people coming face to face with heaven, you would think someone might finally actually get to see it. But they never do, do they?

Y’know I’ve never told anyone this. Except my parents after 6 weeks in a coma following a horrific car wreck in the ’70s. I saw no light, I saw no relatives but I did see my parents talking to my doctor about how I wasn’t expected to live thru the night- I was in the the ICU getting CPR. I got mad. I’m still here. My parents still can’t understand it. Neither can I.

MRIs and transcranial magnetic stimulation (which sounds dirtier than it is). The hypoxia hypothesis is mostly dead, now. The current belief is that it has to do with remnant activity in certain lobes of the brain.

Most NDE folks experience love on a level beyond earthly love. This is why the lose any fear of death. Most also initially prefer to stay in the light/love but are reminded of earthly commitments and choose again. If God is love perhaps they have met God. If we are extensions of God perhaps we are indivisible from God when not with the body. A Course in Miracles says we are asleep while earthbound – asleep to who and what we really are. I believe the NDE is like waking briefly from a coma. We are not really separate beings and mind is what we truly are.

I beleive that ppl that undergo NDE don’t seem to visualy see our spiritual energy from its inner source found in our body, unless they have traveled inside the universe and where able to see very small detail on this pure energy. I believe we can gain this access more accuretely by only taking simple chemicals that triggers or brain to activate something more pure and enter into the energy itself to see how it functions, the vibrations, its structure, or properties that may help us to reveal this powerful source. One of many already found to induce dreams is the intake of DMT.

A description of either seeing inside your own mind, traveling inside the universe or seeing inside your own spiritual matrix. “Discrete elements found in ultra-speed, complex vaulted hemispherical concaved curving’s, radiating beams of liquid-light and imaging patterns of geometric objects. Inter-morphing, new brilliant colors that form when light travels through you and itself. Coils of energy, DNA and energy-template found with particles/tiny objects that swirl inside and around your liquid beam matrix. Atoms swirl inside and around empty space, sparkling energy and overlapping wavy patterns of color.” http://miqel.com/entheogens/dmt_first_time_report.html